So to encourage people not to engage in piracy, they’re going to force everyone to watch yet another annoying, time-wasting, gratification-delaying warning screen that can only be avoided by engaging in piracy.

Music piracy started to go downhill once it became easier, faster and safer to download songs legally. Before iTunes, the only way to download music was to do so illegally. People wanted to download music, so what were they supposed to do?

It takes me less than 10 seconds to download a song from iTunes that will automatically sync to my Mac and iPhone and is backed up in the cloud. That’s hard to compete with. Piracy will never match that user experience.

Piracy should never be the more user-friendly option. Going up against easier, faster and free is a losing proposition. It’s incredibly easy to rent and purchase movies and TV shows from Amazon, Apple, Vudu and others. Unfortunately, movie studies are keeping a lot of their content out of digital video stores because they want to push physical media sales — media that comes with two unskippable warnings, outdated trailers and even commercials.

In what world is HBO Go a to-go app and service for viewing TV shows? Not in this world, that’s for sure.

There will be no HBO episodes on a plane, train or automobile, because you cannot cache episodes on HBO Go for when you don’t have an Internet connection. I’m traveling this week for seven days to Pittsburgh, and it looks like I won’t be able to catch upon Game of Thrones while I’m traveling. It would seem to me that one of the main reasons for HBO Go would be to allow viewers to catch up on TV shows.

The hotel wifi will almost certainly not be good enough for me to stream episodes. It’s not just that HBO Go requires an Internet connection, it needs a good one, especially if you like viewing your video at anything above 1995-online video quality. So, I have to ask, how is HBO Go, a to-go app and service?

I cannot watch episodes on the go with it. I cannot at all. The only thing HBO Go is good for is watching episodes in my own home when I’m away from my own TV. Or if I were to visit a relative or a friend with a fast Internet connection and wanted to watch TV by myself (it’s HBO Go, not HBO social).

Can someone explain why HBO Go doesn’t support caching of episodes?

This issue doesn’t get to the biggest issue with HBO Go; the service requires a cable TV subscription, tethering users to TVs, cable and old ways of thinking about video. I’d love to use HBO Go as a standalone service for $10-20 a month for the pleasure of watching HBO shows without needing cable. I’d be able to watch shows on my TV via a Internet-connected setup box such as the XBOX 360, Apple TV, Boxee box or one of the many other ones. And, in this post-cable world, I’d love to be able to watch my favorite shows on the go.

But, let’s get back to the first major issue with HBO Go: it requires a strong Internet connection. In HBO’s world, a world that wants to protect traditional cable viewing at all costs, how could someone possibly want to watch an HBO show on an airplane?

HBO is one of those companies that complains bitterly that people pirate their content, but doesn’t try to provide legal content in ways that people want to use it. The only way to do mobile viewing of an HBO show is to wait for up to a year after the season airs and purchase it on iTunes, Amazon.com or another digital service. Then you can load it onto a mobile device and view it. Very user friendly and modern. Who wouldn’t want to be a year behind on a TV show, all because they wanted to be able to watch TV on a mobile device.

That’s the only legal way. In 2012. I may not have an MBA, but I’m pretty sure that making it easy for people to buy your content is a good way to get them to actually buy it.

As it stands, HBO Go is a good way to watch HBO on an iPad or a laptop on a couch, but nothing more (I don’t understand the concept of putting HBO Go on set-top boxes, since the only way to get HBO Go service is to have cable in the first place, and cable boxes are in fact set-top boxes). This is not a to go service, but I hope that eventually HBO adds both the ability to download shows for offline viewing (or viewing when wifi speeds aren’t fast enough) and the ability to subscribe to just HBO — not the rest of the trash on cable.

Since I don’t have a cable subscription, this whole post is purely academic, of course.

It’s convenient, it’s not that expensive, and the selection is just good enough.

Yes. Yes. And Yes.

Just as the best way to slow music piracy was to make it easier and more convent to not pirare (think iTunes and now services such as Spotify). When piracy is the easier option (think Napster before iTunes), people will do that. Make being a legal customer the easy and fun option, and people will pay.

At the time, pilfering movies was a whole lot easier than watching them legally. Netflix’s streaming catalog had a tiny number of titles, most of them not to my liking. Apple’s iTunes rental plan had more titles, but too many restrictions (paying $4 for just 24 hours of access to a movie was a bad deal). I outlined what I called the perfect online streaming service—I wanted a plan that had a library as extensive as Netflix’s DVD plan, but which allowed for unlimited viewing—and I promised to pay as much as $40 a month for it. Netflix’s instant watching service isn’t anything close to that, of course. But in the last year it has improved its selection and accessibility (you can now get it on pretty much any device you own) just enough to hit a tipping point. I’m happy to pay $8 a month for not-terrible selection and amazing convenience. And nowadays, I almost never turn to BitTorrent.